Entitlement Fraud - It will make you sick to your stomach

Why do we believe that there is no way to cut from entitlements?

When most people think about Federal government spending, they immediately think about military spending and how it takes up the majority of the spending. But, that old meme doesn't even cover half of what is spent. I don't give much credence to fact checking websites, because they are usually politically biases one way or another. But, PolitiFact put out the article; Pie chart of 'federal spending' circulating on the Internet is misleading to debunk the meme that 57% of Federal spending. Here is the summary and their representation of how Federal spending is broken down.

Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid collectively account for a majority of federal spending. Spending on food and agriculture is still small, but it does quadruple from 1 percent to 4 percent.

You will notice that the biggest chunk is Health Care at 28%. That is more than Social Security and Defense spending. It is more than most of the discretionary spending combined.

Here is National Priorities with a more exact breakdown and some numbers attached to the pie pieces.

You will notice, that back in 2015, Medicare cost the taxpayers $985.7 billion. Another number you should notice is that the tax payers fork out $229.2 billion towards the interest on the national debt. The national debt that is over $20 trillion dollars and is still growing each year, because it has been decades since the Federal government has broken even on spending.

I bring these numbers up, because in Detroit a group of people were just busted for Medicare fraud of $132 million as part of an larger bust on over 400 people to the tune of $1.3 billion.

One of the examples of abuses was this nugget.

A doctor at a Houston clinic is accused of writing 12,000 prescriptions for opioids, enough for more than 2 million illegal doses.

We have an opioid abuse epidemic and it would seem that the Federal government is helping it by providing lax checks and balances on health care entitlements.

The Detroit Executive caught making fraudulent claims managed to bring in plenty of money

The conspiracy generated so much money that Rashid withdrew $500,000 from a bank this month and stuffed the cash in a duffel bag, the government said. A surveillance team of federal agents watched him enter and leave the bank.

And apparently, even after he was stopped once, he just put up a new sign on his door and continued the scam.

“(Rashid) did not stop his fraudulent scheme there,” Foster said. “Instead he created two new companies, merely changing the name on the door to the existing practice and continued ... circumventing Medicare’s rules and regulations by not disclosing his own involvement with the practice.”

But, that's nothing, the big money was down in Miami where LAST YEAR, three people were charged with a $1 billion Medicare fraud scheme.

Esformes and his co-conspirators are also alleged to have further enriched themselves by receiving kickbacks in order to steer these beneficiaries to other health care providers – including community mental health centers and home health care providers – who also performed medically unnecessary treatments that were billed to Medicare and Medicaid. In order to hide the kickbacks from law enforcement, these kickbacks were often paid in cash, or were disguised as payments to charitable donations, payments for services and sham lease payments, court documents allege.

Keeping track? That is $1 billion a year in fraud and growing, because back in 2015, the
National Medicare Fraud Takedown Results in Charges Against 243 Individuals for Approximately $712 Million in False Billing

But, not to be left out the SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) is losing track off $700 million each year. Because it is hard to track SNAP because of the EBT debit cards, things like this happen.

Michael Paul Atkinson Jr., owner of Midway Market in Macon, Ga., raked in more than $5 million by making fake charges to customers’ EBT cards. He was sentenced to five years in prison.

And of course, it doesn't take much for a handful of South Florida convenience stores to do more than $13 million in fraudulent food stamp transactions, leading to the largest food stamp fraud take-down in U.S. history last year.

If each year, they find billions of dollars of fraud, how much fraud are they missing? In a system of a trillion dollars, 1% fraud is a lot of money. But, we are told that there are no cuts to be made in mandatory spending. We are told that benefits can't be cut, because people "paid" for them. The hard truth of the matter is, the Federal government shouldn't be spending any of this money in the first place. The military is defined in the Constitution as are other things. But, retirement savings, health care and aid is not. And as long as there are handouts from the government, there will be people willing to abuse the system.

If you didn't pay close enough attention, you might have not noticed that the people defrauding the government of millions are not actually people in need. Sure, there are small time individuals doing fraud, but the big fish are educated doctors and executives. Because, it matters not, what a person learns, if they don't have the moral compass to know what they are doing is wrong.

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Let the positive energy sing!

More Power to the Minnows!!